All About Solving Problems & Exceeding Expectations

October 19, 2016

UNDERSTANDING THE ECONOMICS

With an understanding of efficiency being such a priority at FINFROCK, it’s only natural that we have goals for our work beyond just doing business. We want to exceed our customer’s expectations by doing great work that we’re proud of.

As the architect, engineer, and contractor of hundreds of parking structures we’ve gained an exceptional amount of experience and cost history for different functions and aesthetic treatments. One owner made use of that knowledge when developing a large site that would include several parking structures to serve retail, residential and office buildings.

After analyzing the master site plan, FINFROCK asked why the streets were laid out at angles that would cause all of the parking structures to be inefficiently designed, making them costly to construct. The answer—an underground utility line would be too expensive to relocate, so the development had been planned to avoid this added expense. Not taken into consideration was the added cost of the parking structures. FINFROCK was able to calculate the additional cost quickly to build the less efficient parking before the owner invested in plans for buildings that would have been too expensive to build.

Having this information early in the process allowed the owner to change the master plan, relocate the utility line for several hundred thousand dollars and exceed his expectations by saving several million dollars for each parking structure.

SOLVING CHALLENGING PROBLEMS

Another client approached us with a project that was over budget. While the building was originally designed to be constructed using a different building system than ours, his experience with FINFROCK led him to believe he could reduce risk and cost for the project by implementing our system. Our initial reaction was that we could not provide a solution. However, one of our designers suggested an innovative way to frame the building that would potentially lower the cost. We revised the structural system of the building, while maintaining the function and aesthetics, and reduced the cost by over one million dollars.